The Theory of Anything

Here we discuss a 1992 interview with David Deutsch where he makes the case that video games are inherently educational, not addictive, and that children should not be stopped from playing as much as they want. We contrast the view of humans, science, and knowledge promoted there by David Deutsch with the more pessimistic view of thinkers such as Jonathan Haidt today. Bruce and Peter reflect on their own mixed feelings on this issue both as critical rationalists and parents. David Deutsch on video games: https://takingchildrenseriously.com/video-games-a-unique-educational-environment/ Peter briefly quotes from this recent article by Jonathan Haidt: https://www.thefp.com/p/jonathan-haidt-worried-about-the-boys-too Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bnielson01 --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support

Bruce summarizes his (unique?) understanding of Karl Popper’s epistemology that (possibly?) straddles the line between orthodox and unorthodox and is Influenced both by Deutsch, more old school Popperians, and his own unique interpretation of critical rationalism. Bruce claims that the key difference between regular "folk epistemology" (i.e. how humans reason without a correct understanding of epistemology) and "Popper's epistemology" (aka "Critical Rationalism" or the correct epistemology) is due to Popper's epistemology having a 'second axis' that regular folk epistemology entirely lacks. This 'second axis' is rooted in a choice to make your theories bold and risky by maximizing empirical content. This makes Popper's epistemology 2-dimensional instead of 1-dimensional. If this fact is missed, Bruce claims your epistemology collapses back to be regular old folk epistemology and you are no longer doing critical rationalism. Refutation, corroboration, explanation, induction, falsification, verisimilitude, “the Popperian war on words,” and “Popper’s ratchet” -- from past podcasts! -- are all touched upon. Follow us on Twitter: ⁠https://twitter.com/bnielson01⁠ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support

In an episode that may (or may not) be his magnum opus, Bruce introduces his term for Karl Popper’s idea that you are only allowed to solve problems with your (scientific) theory by making it more empirical, not less empirical. Bruce makes the case that this is one of Karl Popper’s least appreciated ideas, as all of us are tempted by ad hoc saves that move our ideas in the direction of vagueness. Bruce also considers where conjectures come from and if Popper thought there existed a scientific method. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support

Bruce sympathetically critiques David Deutsch’s concept of “easy to varyness” as a way to judge our explanations. Are our best theories about reality truly hard to vary? Bruce makes the case that Popper’s concept of “ad hocness” may be a strangely interwoven concept. Along the way we get deeper into whether Popperian epistemology is best seen as an attitude or a methodology. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support

Bruce wraps up his epic 6 part series on knowledge and the 'two sources hypothesis' (i.e. Deutsch's theory that all 'knowledge' comes from only two sources: Biological evolution and human minds). What happens if we take all the non-two sources examples of 'adapted information that cause itself to remain so' (e.g. the walking robot, the immune system, trade secrets, animal learning, animal memes, etc.) and give them their own theory distinct from the theory of 'knowledge'? Sort of like a theory of "a simulacrum of knowledge" (to uses Deutsch's own term) or "Simul-Knowledge" for short. This turns out to be remarkably easy: you just take the constructor theory of knowledge without any implicit additional criteria. Doing this has immediate profound implications that impact how we see and understand Deutsch's theory of knowledge. Like to a version of the drawing Bruce refers to throughout the episode. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support

Is human creativity algorithmic? What is the difference between an Inspiration and a perspiration algorithm? Can mechanical processes ever create knowledge? What is the relationship between creativity and explanation? If we had the 'inspiration' algorithm today, would it use perspiration? Here Bruce continues his exploration of these issues and more. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support

Do animals create knowledge? Deutsch claims they don't because all their knowledge is in their genes. Yet he admits that animals do have memes! But aren't memes, by definition, knowledge outside the genome? How does Deutsch attempt to deal with these problems with his theory of knowledge? And how well do his arguments hold up? --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support

Bruce continues to consider what our best theories tell us about knowledge. Is there something special (or even physically different) about the knowledge created by nature through biological evolution and human minds (i.e. the 'two sources hypothesis')? How should we think about knowledge created in human minds that could take us to the moon and beyond or divert an asteroid? Is it physically different from the kind of adapted information created by animals or the immune system? Or does it merely a broader and deeper search for solutions? Along the way, he delves into machine learning, animal behavior, the immune system, trade secrets, robots, and many other concepts related to David Deutsch’s ideas about knowledge but are outside the 'two sources' and thus not considered 'knowledge' by David Deutsch. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support

In the previous episode, Bruce pointed out an apparent contradiction between Deutsch's criteria for knowledge as 'adapted information that causes itself to remain so' and his example of the 'walking robot algorithm' which is a case of adapted information causing itself to remain so but that Deutsch doesn't consider to be knowledge. This time we consider if we can eliminate the 'walking robot algorithm' from being considered 'knowledge' using Deutsch's and Marletto's Constructor Theory of Knowledge. Does the Constructor Theory of Knowledge save the 'two sources hypothesis'? (i.e. the hypothesis that there are only two sources of knowledge: biological evolution and human ideas) --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support

What is the “two sources hypothesis,” or the idea that there exist only two sources of knowledge in the known universe: Darwinian natural selection and human minds? Does a “genetic programming algorithm” used to make a robot walk create knowledge? Thus begins our deep dive into Deutsch's Theory of Knowledge and particularly his "Two Source Hypothesis." Bruce hints that this is leading towards an investigation into the difference between a non-testable (or philosophical) explanation and a bad explanation as our series on knowledge continues. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support

What is the “problem of open-endedness”? Bruce explores how what might sound like an esoteric machine-learning issue may actually be interwoven with our deepest theories on evolution, human consciousness, and knowledge creation. Also included: Bruce's guide to how NOT to argue with a Creationist. References: Kenneth Stanley's article: "Open-endedness: The last grand challenge you’ve never heard of"The Beginning of InfinityProbably Approximately Correct: Nature's Algorithms for Learning and Prospering in a Complex World --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support

Here we move three arguments from social media to the podcast. 1. Given Deutsch’s universal explainer hypothesis, does it make sense to say that men commit more crimes due to testosterone? Are humans only 'approximately' Universal Explainers? 2. Can anything in reality be simulated? What exactly does it mean to be simulated? 3. Is “heat death” a bummer? What would Conan the Cimmerian say? --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support

Here we use Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s essay “The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority” as a springboard to discuss majority rule, moral progress, knowledge growth, wokism, Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance, and “big agriculture.” --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support

With guest Ivan Phillips, we discuss and debate subjective vs objective morality. Does the concept of objective morality ever make sense given “Hume’s guillotine”? Can humans ever really live as though morality is subjective? Along the way, we take detours into Bayesian epistemology vs critical rationalism. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support

How does ChatGPT really work? Is there a relationship between a program like ChatGPT and artificial general intelligence (AGI)? This time we review the famous paper "Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early Experiments with GPT-4" from Microsoft Research as well as Melanie Mitchell's criticisms of it. Other papers mentioned: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks (2015)GPT-4 Technical ReportLanguage Models are Few-Shot Learners (2020) --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support

This week we have criminologist Brian Boutwell on again for part 2 of our discussion on critical rationalism and social science. Does all science share the same structure? How do you apply Popper's epistemology to social sciences? Are there laws of human nature? If humans are universal explainers, what does it mean to study our behavior? See episode 68 for a summary of Caldwell's "Clarifying Popper" that we discuss. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support

Bruce Caldwell (a scholar interested in Popper and Hayek) wrote a long paper in the Journal of Economic Literature (March 1991) called 'Clarifying Popper'. In this episode, Bruce Nielson summarizes and discusses Caldwell’s paper on how Popper’s ideas could be applied to economics. How well did Bruce Caldwell do in his goal of clarifying Popper's epistemology? Out next episode is another interview with Brian Boutwell and we discuss this paper a few times. So this summary will help those that don't have access to it. Copy of Bruce Caldwell's "Clarifying Popper" --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support

Though our guest Mark Biros is clearly immersed in critical rationalism and the worldview of Popper and Deutsch, he also has some fairly strong criticisms of some of the ideas popular in what could be called the CritRat community. Here we try to work out our differing ideas on environmentalism, epistemology, quantum mechanics, social media, optimism, monarchies, cults, human extinction, and more. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support

Historian Matt Bowman discusses his new book, The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America. Betty and Barney Hill were one of the first and most famous persons who claimed to be abducted by aliens. Aside from being a story about UFOs, their life story hinges on a complicated relationship with religion, race, politics, science, and psychology in America in the 50s and 60s. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support

What did David Deutsch get right and wrong in chapter 11, “Time: The First Quantum Concept,” from his first book, Fabric of Reality? Is the flow of time real or an illusion? What does it mean to have free will in a deterministic world? And what are the implications of Bruce’s “Turing world within a Turing world” thought experiment? --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/support